IPIP-HEXACO
Fairness
A public-domain personality facet scoring engine
Instructions: For each statement, select the response that best describes how accurately it reflects your typical behavior and attitudes. There are no right or wrong answers. Respond as honestly as possible for the most informative academic baseline.
Scale: 1 = Very Inaccurate · 2 = Moderately Inaccurate · 3 = Neither · 4 = Moderately Accurate · 5 = Very Accurate
Your Fairness Profile
IPIP-HEXACO · Ashton, Lee & Goldberg (2007) · Public Domain
Facet Interpretation
—
—
—
—
Academic Citation
Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., & Goldberg, L. R. (2007). The IPIP–HEXACO scales: An alternative, public-domain measure of the personality constructs in the HEXACO model. Personality and Individual Differences, 42, 1515–1526. doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2007.02.003
About the IPIP-HEXACO Fairness Scale (H-Fair)
The IPIP-HEXACO Fairness scale (H:Fair) is a public-domain personality facet instrument from the International Personality Item Pool, constructed by Ashton, Lee, and Goldberg (2007) as a freely usable alternative to the proprietary HEXACO Personality Inventory. Fairness is the second facet of the Honesty-Humility dimension and measures the degree to which individuals avoid dishonest, exploitative, or rule-violating behavior — particularly in low-stakes situations where detection risk is minimal. Items target theft, tax cheating, scam admiration, and interpersonal exploitation.
The Fairness construct emerged robustly in cross-cultural lexical personality studies in which equity-related descriptors consistently loaded on the Honesty-Humility factor separate from Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. The IPIP representation achieves a reported alpha of .77 across the ten-item scale. Research by Lee and Ashton has demonstrated that this facet independently predicts counterproductive work behavior, academic dishonesty, cooperation in prisoner's dilemma experiments, and willingness to exploit others in economic games — effects that persist after controlling for broad Conscientiousness and Agreeableness scores.
Fairness vs. Dark Triad Machiavellianism (MACH-IV): Key Differences
| Feature | IPIP-HEXACO Fairness (H-Fair) | Dark Triad Machiavellianism (MACH-IV) |
|---|---|---|
| Core Construct | Rule compliance & honest conduct | Cynical manipulation of others |
| Item Count | 10 items (IPIP-HEXACO) | 20 items (full MACH-IV) |
| Access | Public domain — free any use | Public domain |
| Alpha Reliability | .77 (Ashton et al., 2007) | ~.79 (Christie & Geis, 1970) |
Facet Position Within the HEXACO Model
The Fairness facet (H-Fair) is one of four facets within the Honesty-Humility (H) dimension of the six-factor HEXACO personality model developed by Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee. Unlike the Big Five framework, HEXACO adds a sixth dimension — Honesty-Humility — capturing variance in sincere, fair, modest, and non-materialistic behavior that the five-factor model distributes across Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. The IPIP representation of this facet, developed in collaboration with Lewis Goldberg and the International Personality Item Pool project, provides researchers with an openly licensed operationalization that achieves internal consistency (alpha = .77) comparable to the proprietary HEXACO-PI-R while remaining entirely free for academic, organizational, and educational deployment.
Research and Applied Utility
Researchers and students in personality psychology, organizational behavior, and educational research regularly use the IPIP-HEXACO facet scales as targeted instruments for hypothesis testing, survey battery supplementation, and educational self-reflection activities. Because the IPIP scales are public domain, they may be embedded in any survey platform, online tool, or research system without licensing restrictions. The Fairness (H-Fair) scale specifically provides a standardized academic baseline for the fairness construct within the Honesty-Humility domain, enabling comparison with published normative data from the Ashton, Lee, and Goldberg (2007) validation study. The scale has been applied in cross-cultural research across more than 35 countries, providing researchers with substantial normative reference material.
Frequently Asked Questions — Fairness Scale (H-Fair)
Does a low score here mean someone is actually dishonest in their daily life?
Not necessarily — and the distinction matters. The IPIP-HEXACO Fairness facet measures a personality disposition toward rule compliance and equity, not a behavioural record. Someone can score low on this trait and still behave honestly in most contexts, particularly where detection risk is high or social accountability is strong. The score reflects how a person reasons about fairness as a value internally, rather than providing a log of their actions.
How do organisations end up full of unfair behaviour even when they hire good people?
Situational factors in organisations often override individual trait differences entirely. Research on institutional misconduct consistently shows that ambiguous accountability, normalisation of small rule-bending, and leadership modelling of opportunistic behaviour predict unethical conduct more reliably than employee personality profiles. Even high-fairness individuals show higher rates of rule-bending in environments that signal rules as optional. Institutional design matters as much as individual character.
Is the person who never bends the rules just naive about how the world works?
This framing reflects a common cultural assumption that research doesn't support. High-fairness individuals are not less intelligent or strategically capable — they have different ethical threshold settings. Research shows they achieve comparable professional outcomes while experiencing less moral dissonance and building stronger long-term reputational trust, trading occasional short-term disadvantage for durable ethical credibility.
Why do people who grow up in disadvantaged circumstances sometimes reason differently about rules?
Context shapes these dispositions in measurable ways. Research on moral development shows that individuals who experienced systematic rule violations directed at themselves often develop more nuanced, context-dependent fairness reasoning rather than blanket rule-following. This isn't moral deficiency — it's a sophisticated adaptation to an environment where formal rules weren't reliably fair. Fairness as a personality trait is always interpreted against the individual's lived experience.
Does this tool replace a formal ethical or integrity assessment?
No. The IPIP-HEXACO Fairness scoring engine is an educational self-reflection instrument based on public-domain personality research. It does not assess individual conduct, make conclusions about ethical behaviour, or substitute for professional evaluation. Any formal evaluation of integrity or ethical conduct in professional, legal, or research contexts requires qualified professional oversight and the appropriate validated instruments.